Burn With Me
by ArcticCactus
Summary: Audrey has a strange dream after being hit by a bus. She wakes up later in a hospital bed, and sees Prisoner Zero, before falling unconscious again. When she regains consciousness, the Doctor has some unsettling news. One-Shot. The Sombrero Galaxy is real, I swear.


**Ignite.**

In one moment, Audrey was standing in the rain, waiting for the bus. In the next, she was lying on the dirty sidewalk screaming as the pressure threatened to crush her. She couldn't move. She could only lie there, wondering how just how long it would take her to die. She had no idea what was happening. She only knew that this was surely her end.

And then the pressure was gone. Audrey kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut, panting and feeling the grain of the wooden floor beneath her. Her breath caught in her throat when she realized. _Wood?_ But she had been standing at the bus stop only moments before...

It was a long time before she could force her eyes to open, blinking to focus the scene around her. She lost her breath again when she was finally able to observe her surroundings. Audrey lay on a wood floor, but that she already knew. It was the shelves that took away her breath. Floor to ceiling, filled entirely with books. She recalled her last thought before the pressure had begun. _If I could, I would do nothing but read all day, even if I run out of new books._

Running out of books would be impossible here. She would be able to read for months. She smiled and pulled herself to her feet, slowly, carefully. Ignoring the pain in her body, she moved to the nearest shelf and selected the first book her touched. Audrey frowned slightly when she saw there was no title, but it didn't matter. A book was a book. So she eased the cover open, careful not to damage the thing. It _was_ someone else's, after all.

Odd, there was no title page. The first few pages were blank. Every page she turned to was blank. In fact, the entire book was devoid of words. A deep frown pulled on the corners of her mouth, and she reached for another book. It was blank too. Becoming frantic, she reached for a third. Blank.

Audrey pulled book after book from the shelves. They were all blank. She sank to the floor, hugging herself and trying not the cry. This shouldn't have been affecting her so much. So someone had a thing for blank books. She shouldn't have cared. She didn't even know how she got to the room. It could very well have been a dream.

Something moved in her peripheral vision. Audrey's head whipped toward it, and she watched as a book pulled itself from the self and fell to the floor, entirely of its own accord. Once there, the pages turned as if by wind, and settled on a page near the back of the book.

Audrey crawled forward, transfixed. The page had words on it. Words! Of all the things to find on the pages of a book. Her relief was short lived, however. In her excitement, she had failed to actually _read_ the words. When she did, she scrambled away in terror.

BURN WITH ME

A small flame appeared in the center of the page. It quickly spread to the rest of the book, and then to those on the shelf nearest to it. Soon the whole room was ablaze. Audrey curled herself into a ball in the center of the room, feeling nothing but pain and pressure. Her entire body felt like it was on fire, though no flames touched her.

Then it was cold. Oh, the heat was still there, but it was no longer in the air. It clung to her skin, but above it she could feel coldness. She pried her eyes open and found herself staring into the face of an EMT

"Wha...?" It wasn't really a question, more of a general sound of confusion. Her mind couldn't form a coherent thought. Words were clearly impossible.

The EMT smiled kindly. "You were hit by a bus. The driver lost control. You're lucky to be alive."

The world shifted into blackness only seconds later. As her consciousness faded, she thought she heard someone whispering in her ear, but it must have been her imagination. She slipped farther into her dreams, until she was struggling to hear the whispered words.

"Burn with me," it said. "Burn with me."

Audrey woke to find herself in a hospital. She was surprised to find that she felt no pain. There was a kind of numbness that seemed to have settled into her limbs. She probably couldn't move, but she didn't care.

It slowly came to Audrey's attention that people were screaming. They were yelling something about the sun and incineration. _That_ caught her attention. Incineration meant fire. Fire was bad. Very bad. Audrey feared fire more than anything. She decided that maybe she should try to move, to escape the fire.

It was difficult, but she eventually managed to move her arms and use them to raise herself to a sitting position. It felt like it should have been painful, but it really wasn't. Audrey didn't feel any pain. Maybe that was a bad sign, but she didn't care. For now, Audrey was grateful that she didn't feel anything. It probably would have been agony.

It was as Audrey struggled to stand that two people ran into the room, sticking a broom handle through the door handles in an attempt to keep something out. They took no notice of Audrey and backed away from the door. The redhead woman was talking to someone on the phone, and they both looked terrified.

It wasn't long before the broom broke, and a woman and two little girls came into the room. Audrey didn't understand why those two were so afraid of a mother and her kids. Then she saw the teeth. That was just creepy.

The woman with the teeth started talking, and that was when all the pain Audrey had been missing came at full force. She fell to the floor with a thud. The pain was, of course, unbearable. All that numbness was gone. It was no surprise to Audrey that her consciousness began to fade, again.

She was, however, surprised to hear that same whispered voice.

"Burn with me," it said. "Burn with me."

Complete and utter terror.

That was all Audrey felt when she woke up. Because she wasn't in a hospital. If she were, then there would be no fear. Hospitals are nice, safe places where people go to be healed. This was not a hospital. Or, at least, it didn't look like one.

Hospitals were usually brightly lit, and clean. There was always a heart monitor and other machines. It always smelled sterile, as well. Audrey should have still been in a hospital. But she wasn't.

This place was dimly lit. There was only one lamp, and it was off in the opposite corner. The walls seemed to be a kind of tan color, and the floor was wood.

And so Audrey lay there, staring at the ceiling, too utterly terrified to even attempt to get up. She was in pain again anyways. She didn't want to get up. She wanted to be magically transported back to her own home. She really just wanted to be somewhere she recognized. Hadn't she just been hit by a bus? And then there had been that terrible dream...

Audrey jumped when the door banged open, and a tall man with floppy hair and a bowtie came jumping in.

"Oh good, you're awake! I was starting to think you'd never wake up." He half ran over to the bed and pointed a _thing_ at Audrey. The _thing_ had a green light at the end and made a strange sound. Audrey shrank away from the man, and pulled the blanket closer to her. Childhood logic seemed to take over her mind. _If I pull the blanket over my head, nothing will be able to get me._ Therefore, Audrey pulled the blanket even closer. She was now curled up against the wall that the bed was pushed up against, the blanket around her shoulders. She watched the strange man warily, wondering what the _hell_ was going on. And, of course, she was still terrified. She was shaking, actually, not that she had noticed just yet.

It was all too much. First the fire/dream/thing, then the hospital and the woman with the teeth, and now this. Audrey wasn't sure she could take it. The man seemed to notice her distress and backed off a little.

Audrey struggled to speak. The words just didn't seem to want to form in her throat. It was difficult, but eventually she got out a sentence.

"What the _fuck_ is going on?"

The man jumped a little at her language, but immediately launched into an explanation. "Ah! Well, you see, according to the hospitals records-which, by the way, were rubbish-you were in a car accident about a year ago, and you've been in a coma ever since. _So_ Prisoner Zero had kind of worked his way into your mind, and it was a bit easier than usual because you seem to have some telepathic abilities. Also, you're not human. That's why the hospital couldn't cure you, they didn't know how. Their medicines where the reason you were in the coma in the first place. And when I noticed that, I took you back to the TARDIS so I could heal you properly. That took about three days, and now here you are, good as new. I am the Doctor, after all."

Audrey stared at him. "That made absolutely no sense, whatsoever."

"No, it made perfect sense. You just didn't listen."

"Take me home."

The Doctor sighed, looking sad all of the sudden. "I can't do that."

"Why the hell not?" Audrey demanded. She didn't care about all this. She just wanted to go home, crawl into her own bed, and maybe read a good book.

"Well, first of all, you were in a coma for a year, so you don't really have a home anymore. And then there's the fact that you're an alien, so I can't really let you go back to Earth."

Audrey blinked at him, completely indifferent. "Then take me somewhere else. I don't care where. I just want to sleep."

"You can sleep here!" the Doctor argued.

"No, I can't."

"Yes, you can!" the Doctor shot back immediately.

"No, I can't."

"You can."

"I can't."

"You can."

"I can't and if you don't take me somewhere now, then I will slap you in the face repeatedly."

The Doctor looked surprised, but reluctantly agreed. After helping Audrey out of bed and into the console room, he piloted the TARDIS to a peaceful planet called Leelan in the Sombrero Galaxy. The people there looked vaguely human and Audrey did not stand out too much.

The Doctor managed to find quite a lot of Leelanian money for Audrey. While she was grateful for all that the Doctor had done for her, she didn't want any part of his life, which they had spoken about while the TARDIS was on its way to Leelan (the Doctor had made the journey take longer for this very purpose). Now Audrey was going to settle down in a small house on an alien planet and spend all her time reading.

The Doctor was a bit unhappy about it, but if she was happy... He wouldn't interfere. Truthfully, he had been hoping to get a second new companion out of the whole thing, but it just wasn't to be.

Ah well. In the end, he was happy traveling with Amy and Audrey was happy on Leelan. Sure, she still didn't know why she'd had that dream when the bus hit her, or what species she was, but it didn't really matter. After all, all she'd ever wanted to do was read, and now she could spend her days doing just that.

She was happy. The unknowns _wouldn't_ torment her days. She _wouldn't_ have nightmares about that room with the books. That voice _wouldn't_ whisper to her daily. Audrey _wouldn't_ wonder what would have happened had she gone with the Doctor. She _was_ happy. And if any of the Leelanians thought otherwise, they kept it to themselves, as they had that Audrey would hit anyone who even _implied_ that she was unhappy.

Because she _was _happy. She _was_.


End file.
